I Was Sure It Was Locked. I Had Never Checked.
What stays with me is how ordinary the mistake was. I had a feeling that a site was locked, and I let the feeling outrank my own assistant, which was pointing at the problem. A feeling is not a test, and this time it took 12 outside checks to show me.
I Was Sure It Was Locked. I Had Never Checked.
On 10/21/26, 12 of 12 outside places could reach an old staff website I had told my assistant was locked. The assistant’s first check went wrong because it ran from my own office computer, which is allowed in, so it proved nothing. A check from outside showed the login page, on old software that no longer gets security updates, with an expired security certificate. I had the site stopped at 3:25 pm, and four follow-ups are still open, including a firewall block. Test private things from outside, because a check from inside only shows what insiders see.
Moving a 4:12am Monitor Report Ahead of the Afternoon Send
On 10/9/26 someone reported our admin pages were ‘super slow to load’ at 2:49 pm, and I suspected our afternoon run. The agent confirmed that 39 slow database searches between 2:25 and 2:27 pm pushed database CPU to 89%. That spike ended 20 minutes before the complaint, so it probably did not cause the slowness. I moved those searches to a 4:12 am report, and the morning scan starts once its setting is turned on. The real cause of the 2:49 pm slowness is still open, and a snapshot during the next stall would settle it.
Cloudflare Error 1001 on a Domain That Looked Perfectly Configured
On 10/15/26 a customer’s website had not loaded for about an hour, even though the settings they read out over the phone sounded right. The site showed an error that means our side did not recognize the address, which fits a wrong name on the account. The account held a web address that is not registered anywhere, while the real one was registered under a similar name and set up like a working site. I did not change the account, because it is a live customer record, and I drafted a reply asking staff to correct it. I have not confirmed the site loads afterward.
If you have an old site or login you assume is private, reply and tell me how you would check it from outside.
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Ben Downey